This invention relates to an apparatus and a method for controlling image manipulation and storage. More particularly, this invention relates to an apparatus and a method for storing image data into digital storage in accordance with a device measure determined by the user's action.
An image processing system generally performs acquisition, storage, processing, communication and display of images. A digital image is acquired through an image pick-up device such as a vidicon camera or a TV camera. The image pick-up device produces an entire image of the problem domain every 1/30 sec., for example. This time interval is often called one frame or one frame time. A digital image thus consists of a plurality of frames and is stored in a storage as the image data. As well known in the art, an 8-bit image of size 1024 by 1024 pixels requires one million bytes of storage. Thus, providing adequate storage is a challenge in the design of image processing systems. With this respect, more recent image processing systems are generally designated to easily connect to a large video random-access memory (VRAM) array for image storage and display as well as a dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) for program and data memory. The video RAM was first offered by Texas Instruments and has been through several iterations, with densities now reaching 1 Mbit. The basic VRAM offerings contain a serial access port that allows delivery of an entire row of data to a video subsystem or other storage. With screen resolution up to 512 by 512 pixels, VRAMs can handle video scanout unassisted. With higher-resolution display, the pixel rate exceeds the VRAMs' serial-port data rate, so that they are connected to a memory such as a high-speed off-chip shift register or the like. Such a short term storage can be accessed rapidly but the capacity thereof is relatively small. Accordingly, the image data are stored therein only for a short time.